Помилуй мя, Боже

August 16, 2010

Be quick, Isaac! We haven't much time. At Five of the Clock old Doctor Squibb will be dissecting a Porpess at Queen's Lane Caffè-House. That's right, Isaac. A Porpess. A Grampus in miniature. And he's promised to donate the Blubber of it to whomsoever agrees to assist him. That will be you, Isaac. You will have enough Sea-Tallow to keep your candle burning throughout the Winter, so you can scribble, whatsoever it is that you scribble, late into the Night. Are you ready, then, Scribbler?

Quaery the First: Whether any have read the Treatise of the learnèd German physician Theophilus Glaubnix, entitled Alimentatio per rectum, which, being English'd, offers instructions for the feeding of the sick and infirm through their very anus. You've heard right, Isaac. The aft shaft. The anneau d'enfer. And whether it be in truth a serviceable port of Entry for e'en the bravest of Suppers, as Chops and Ale, or only for flaccid Puddings, bland Peas, &c.

Whether, moreover, it be true what we have heard, that in some parts of America the common Men and Women oppose the chirurgical inducement of abortio at every stage of a Woman's graviditas, e'en before the moment of empsychosis (which is universally known to occur upon the fortieth Day after the Parents' copulatio) wherein a humane Soul be divinely transduc'd into what before was naught but an homunculus having the outward Conformation of a li'l Manny-kin, but sharing no-wise in Man's true nature. Whether they have ever seen an Homuncule aborted in the first or second Month that is capable of e'en the roughest Imitation of humane Action, as going about in Hats and Cloaks, or playing a simple round of Sice-Deuce.

Whether there be any justice to the interdiction placed upon Marriage between Cousins in some of the American colonies, in view of the great Probability resulting therefrom of Monstrous births. And whether the Book of the Learnèd American doctor Percival Gudgeon is correct to assert, that a marriage twixt a man and his cousin's cousin yields up what is called a half-wit; while a marriage twixt the same man and his father's brother's daughter yields a quarter-wit; twixt him and his father's sister's daughter, an eighth-wit; twixt him and his mother's brother's daughter, a sixteenth-wit; and, finally, twixt him and his mother's sister's daughter, a pitiable creature: a thirty-second-wit. Whether, finally, it is true that marriage to one's very own Sister yields up naught but a Nit-Wit.

Whether it be true what we have heard, that on the Western side of far Tierra del Fuoco, Men may now marry Men, and Maidens Maidens. And whether this be an effect of their Antarctick situation, which bringeth about sundry other curiosities, as the backwards rotation of the aquatickal Vortex that follows upon the chasse d'eau in every house-hold's Toilette, the Going of handsom'ly costum'd birds upon two Feet only, entirely destitute of Flight, and still other topsey-turvey absurdities.

Whether the Irish be spontaneously generated from the the moist Peat that covers their Isle, or whether they along with the other Keltish nations be translated from the Italick lands, which Hypothesis doth better explain their roughness of Aspect, their weakness for Popery, &c.

Whether also there be such a geographical Boundary as is sometimes call'd the 'Hair-Belt', dividing the Lands to the South and the East --wherein the Men, nay, and e'en the Women, are cover'd with thick Bristles upon Fore-Arm, Chest, and Chin-- from the Lands to the North and the West, where these Parts remain smooth and Milky on all but the coarsest Peasants.

Whether the horrible Rumour we have heard hath some Truth in it, that in places of Industry and Commerce Men are now requir'd to take leave of the very Labour for which they are paid in order to participate in 'Work-Shoppes' that instruct them in all manner of effeminate Foolishness, as how to appreciate working together with men from different Nations (yea, e'en the Nations of the Hair-Belt!), how to respect the unique Skills of cretins and dullards, how to refrain from groping e'en the pinkest and most swollen Bosoms of their washerwomen and tailoresses, &c. O Isaac, how quickly these 'Work-Shoppes' must degenerate into Laughter and Ribaldry!

What's that, Isaac? You say that this our Scientific Society hath implemented mandatory sensitivity Work-Shoppes for all its Members, too? That I will be requir'd to attend such a one to-morrow, and that it will feature Lunch serv'd up in Brown Baggs, and optional Day-Care service for my Sons and Daughters? What need have they for Day-Care? They are home with their Mother and her Retinue of Wet-Nurses, suckling to their li'l Hearts' content like unto a litter of Piglets!

You can't be serious, Isaac. Me? Requir'd? Why, I am already reputed for my Sensitivity. Just ask Squibb: he saw me at the Dogg-Fights Tuesday last. I was seated next to some Savage Islander, whose face was blacken'd by terrible tatus, and whose Lipp was distended by a Disc the size of a serving Tray. Squibb saw me give him a hearty Slap upon the back when our Dogg triomph'd. I e'en took a swig from his Flasque! Did I wipe off my Mouth in disgust? Did I not treat him as every bit my Brother?

What's that, then? You say there is no getting out of it? O all-right. 'Tis no Snow off my Duck. Anyhow I could use what the Spaniards call a siesta 'round Noon-time. Surely no one will take Note if I close my Eyes for a spell.

Dear God, Isaac, no. Do not tell me the Work-Shoppe is to be directed by Eulalia Tubbs. The Eulalia Tubbs? From Humane Resources? That Ogresse will be the Death of me!

What? You say she has written up a List of Counter-Quaeries, to which she seeks my Replies? And she wishes for me to present these Replies to-morrow? Look here, Isaac! Just look at these Counter-Quaeries:

Whether Doctor Smith hath done any Thing of late to foster Dignity and mutual Respect in the Work-Place by 'going out of his Way' to pay a Compliment, or to say some Thing encouraging, to his co-Workers.

Whether Doctor Smith hath ensured that his Work-Place be accessible to Women and Men of diminish'd Motility, as those who are capable not of Perambulation, but onely of Tollutation, Succussation, &c.

What are you snickering at, Isaac? Do you find Mirth in my Suffering? You common Bilge-Rat! You braying Onager! I'll make my Work-Place accessible, I will. Right after I put you in a wheel'd Chair for life!

But truely, Isaac. Do you know what I think? I think I shall have to present a Series of Counter-Counter-Quaeries to Miss Tubbs to-morrow.

June 28, 2010

With Especial Attention to the Americans, the Muscovites, the Magyars, and Various Balkanic Peoples, touching particularly upon their Aspirations to Global Hegemony, and their Use of Air-Conditioning.

Justin E. H. Smith

Organic nationalism, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, supposed, or at least implied, that a nation bears some essential relationship to a particular territory. In the most mythologized version of this belief, the nation is thought, or at least said, to have arisen directly out of the earth, to be literally autochthonous, springing up from the depths without any connection to neighboring groups. Moderate nationalists of the period, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, sought for a way to defend national distinctness without resorting to such crude myth, and while they did not pretend that a people is born directly from the soil, they still hoped to tie national character to the way it is forged over the course of history out of a particular geographical nexus.

A clear demonstration that we are not in fact like plants, rooted in our national soil, is our ability to get up, should we so choose, and go somewhere else. We do not wilt and die, though we also do not remain quite the same. I am an expatriate, and it grows harder with each passing year for me to maintain a personal sense of what being American must mean. I have lived outside of the US steadily for seven years, and spent large segments of the decade before that outside of the country as well. Although I am fully connected, via the internet, to the American media that keep that country's pulse around the clock, it is increasingly difficult for me to maintain any real interest in domestic issues. Unlike nearly all the Americans I know, I am not really made angry, for example, by Glenn Beck. Outraged reactions to the latest stupid thing he has said strike me, I dare say, as a bit undignified. He is a buffoon, and he occupies a niche that has its equivalent in every time and place. Let him do his thing, and let us not stay tuned in to the networks that give him voice.

Expatriation, I mean to say, helps one to overcome the passions with understanding. As my identification with one or the other party to internal American conflicts diminishes, my perception grows sharper of the very long historical processes that give shape to current American life. Thus for example I often find myself trying to make sense for bewildered Europeans of western American crackpot libertarianism by arguing that it evolved directly from the settling of the frontier, with the ethnic cleansing and genocide that that involved, but also with a certain 'spirit' of freedom and individualism that cannot be valued nearly as much in dense urban centers. In turn, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that American imperialism, and the delusions of entitlement and superiority for which individual Americans abroad are so often criticized, flow directly from the late-18th and early-19th-century project of constructing America through expansion into the frontier. Oklahoma and the Phillipines and Iraq were just different stages of the same development, and this centuries-long process has something to do with the perception of the world, and of their place in it, often had by individual Americans.

June 21, 2010

The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.

Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.

The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room --which is in fact the Africa Basement-- is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.

This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.

There are significant differences between brass art and spiderweb art, as there are between societies with metal foundries, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies, dubbed 'resourceful' by the British Museum, whose technology involves only the transformation of things found in the immediate natural environment. If Africa were depicted as a historical rather than a stagnant continent, one thing visitors to the British Museum might learn is that it is members of the broader ethnic family that includes the former inhabitants of the Kingdom of Benin --namely, the Niger-Congo family-- that overran southern Africa long before the era of European expansion, and left the indigenous San and other Khoisan peoples only in isolated pockets or in areas too inhospitable to invite competition for resources. The European arrival at the Cape, then, was not the first time an indigenous people had been displaced or had its way of life disrupted in sub-Saharan Africa. As I always insist, ethnic cleansing is the default activity of humanity, not some unusual disruption of our ordinary commitment to harmonious sharing.

But what I had wanted to say is that, while the spiderweb hat is a fascinating thing that reveals something about humanity worth reflecting on, the brass plaques from 16th-century Benin are, for their part, formidable works of art. I am prepared to say that they are betterthan the Sans' spiderweb hats. And this brings me to something I'd been thinking about very much recently, prior to entering the Africa Room: how is it that one can compare cultures, make judgments as to the relative merit of their attainments, without lapsing away from one's ordinary commitment to universal equality?

There is a sort of illusion, whereby we believe that a society is a
certain way because each of its members, individually, are a certain
way. But it's much more likely that each individual is whatever way
she or he is because of structural or institutional limitations on how one might be
within a given society: the availability of basic goods, access to
information about the outside world, and so on. Correlatively, the
greatness of a society, which might be measured in its technologies and accomplishments
(going to the moon, etc.), says nothing about the greatness of
individuals who belong to that society. I, for example, have never been
to the moon, or helped in any way with the project of sending someone
else there.

And correlative to this, I note, is a point about the
supposed greatness of the human species: it is true that humans have
come up with vastly more impressive inventions than have chimpanzees,
but this is a cumulative record, and not a measure of the relative
greatness of any given human brought into comparison with any
chimpanzee. If you leave me to fend for myself on a desert island, what I
will be able to come up with over the course of my life will not be
much more impressive than what a chimp in similar circumstances might
do; I would not invent the internet, or nuclear power, or the space
shuttle, but at best some scrappy hut made out of twigs.

Matched one-to-one with other animals, humans really are nothing special; similarly matched, members of metal-forging societies have no obvious advantage over hunter-gatherers. What makes societal attainments possible is only a certain slow, quantitative build-up that happens now in one region, now in another, for reasons that are ultimately rooted in features of the natural environment. In this respect, it is to get things backwards to congratulate oneself on coming from a technologically advanced society, or to pity a member of a society capable only of basic transformations of the natural world.

I suspect that domination and exploitation, both within the human species and across species, flow to no small extent from a mistaken judgment about the way individuals living in technologically complex societies must be. We suppose that our society's complexity is a measure of our own individual complexity, and we suppose that failure to participate in an equally complex society must result from the fact that a given human or animal is, individually, quite simple. But once we see that it is in fact the other way around, it becomes perfectly easy at the same time to see how it is possible to go on with one's commitment to equality while nonetheless admitting to being more impressed by metal-forging societies than by web-gathering ones.

Admitting this much, though, would require a certain reorganization of the Africa Room of the British Museum, which, given that this is hardly that august institution's main attraction, probably will not be happening anytime soon.

May 24, 2010

It's Sunday afternoon, I'm on a so-called bullet train from Lyon to Paris, tomorrow's the Pentecost, Abbas was a bit late in getting me the reminder that I'm 'up this Monday', our trusty editor-in-chief claiming that this has been a 'weird week', and for the life of me I can't think of anything to write about. To tell the truth, it's been a weird week for me too. For one thing, I've been travelling, and when I'm travelling the ordinary functioning of my vegetative soul (which recent authors have started calling 'the autonomic nervous system') breaks down entirely. That is to say that the peristaltic motion of my intestine (which used to be an adjective meaning both 'internal' and 'internecine', and was often brought up in connection with the English civil war) switches from the biological to the geological clock, and meanwhile I start to feel like a basalt-plugged volcano.

But I'm opposed to everything the word 'gonzo' stands for, so I can't just crank out some typo-filled bullshit about n'importe quoi (already I feel uncomfortable with the dangling 'about' and 'for' I've managed to let slip by). In Marseille a few days ago I had wanted to write something about the way fashion is best analyzed not as a national phenomenon, but as a sea-based phenomenon --fashion being not haute couture, but just the general way people look, perhaps something not entirely unrelated to the lost art and science of physiognomy--, the basic fashion zones of the world being the Aegeo-Adriatico-Mediterranean, the Sargasso-Caribbean, the Balto-Norwegian, the Michigano-Ontarian, and the Pacific Rim. But then we left Marseille and I was no longer seeing so many Ed Hardy-bedecked goons, whom I had taken to calling 'meatheads', and even, in my own private French, têtes de viande (which in turn made me think of the Roma beggar-woman I saw at the Place de Clichy eating pâté de tête or headcheese with her fingers, straight from the plastic packaging), so that idea for an essay just sort of evaporated. I next thought about writing something on the future of that ill-defined activity we call 'writing' in the age of social networking, as if anyone needed to see more of that sort of stuff.

I had also been reflecting on my experience, around 1989, as a parking-lot attendant/security guard during week-long Grateful Dead concerts at the California Exposition and State Fair Grounds in Sacramento, when, for reasons I could never entirely explain, I cultivated a distinctly martial look, including a buzz-cut and a bomber jacket. So stern and warrior-like was I that when I attempted to inform some band of merry travellers that they could not park their bus here, or vend their friendship bracelets and ramen noodles there, I was not entirely unused to hearing the half-fraternal, half-aggressive reply: "Just smoke a fuckin' fatty, you fuckin' Nazi" (I hate to have to drop my terminal 'g's, even in quotation, but I assure you that is what they said and how they said it).

It was not this memory that made me think my time at Cal Expo worth relating, though, nor yet the obligatory membership in the Teamsters that went along with this job, which first opened my eyes to the dreariness and conventionality of labor unions, and permanently transformed me from a romantic revolutionary into an ambivalent would-be revolutionary. Rather, it was the conversations with my evangelical Christian co-worker, in the parking lot at the Grateful Dead concerts, when Jerry Garcia was still alive, and was not yet memorialized in the name of an ice-cream flavor, and the figure of the 'old hippie' was already familiar, but the figure of the geriatric hippie, or the senescent hippie, was still something quite rare: it was these conversations, with this evangelical Christian whose name I've forgotten but whose face and voice I still know like my own, that I wanted to recount.

We would stroll through the makeshift stalls of 'Shakedown Alley' (I believe it was called), where the Deadheads sold the trinkets that earned them the money to continue on to the next concert site (this could not have been an entirely closed economy; there were surely some parental subventions and lines of trustafarian credit flowing in as well). My Christian friend would survey the revelry, the hackey-sacking and the guitar-playing, the blissful living-for-today that I have since learned to associate more with Renaissance literature than with the vestiges of the 1960s; he would survey all this, and declare: "At bottom, what all of this is, is Satanism."

Now I remember this, while I do not remember a hundred thousand other conversations I had with other would-be revolutionaries, because this was one of the rare occasions in my early life when I heard a judgment coming from someone operating with meaningful categories of analysis, with opinions grounded in beliefs grounded in the supposition of a metaphysical order that assigned a distinct and real value to every creature and deed. I replied: "That's silly, it's not Satanism, it's just idiots trying to have fun." It's an aesthetic failure, I said, or attempted to say, not a moral failure, still less a failure that could be of any interest to the beings you believe to inhabit the supernatural order. My Christian friend said something, in turn, about how Satan's greatest trick is to convince men that he does not exist, and that it is enough for an activity to qualify as worship of the Evil One that it be a sort of revelry in pleasure, and the body, and nature, that it involve a turning away from the one true source of happiness in this life, God. The neopaganism of the 1960s, for him, like the rebirth of the pagan gods in the Renaissance that gave us Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, amount to the recrudescence of that very force that the Christianization of the West was supposed to squelch.

Now I do not mean it at all as a denunciation of this force when I say that, now, upon further reflection, I believe my Christian friend had it exactly right. What we witnessed when we walked down Shakedown Alley really was Satanism, true Satanism (the Satanism that styles its object of worship in a more literal way, such as Anton La Vey's so-called church, inevitably ends up appearing as mere parody). My Christian friend had available to him categories of judgment that enabled him to discern features of the world to which my non-committal liberal upbringing left me blind.

Now it appears that willy-nilly (which does not mean 'half-assed', but is in fact an Anglicization of volens-nolens) I have, after just a few sentences of fumbling around and trying to get my bearings, begun to write about my time as a parking-lot attendant at Grateful Dead concerts, and about the inherent Satanism of the Deadhead movement. But what I had wanted to get to (and I apologize for that dangling 'to', but the canola fields, which used to be called 'rapeseed' fields, have now turned to banlieue and I fear that Paris is approaching, or rather that I am approaching Paris) was that great Satanic author, Rabelais.

I tried reading Rabelais ten years or so ago, when my French was much worse than it is now, and I gave up on page 2 or so, around the third appearance of the archaic word oncque. I recently grew determined to give Rabelais another try when I learned of Laurence Sterne's great admiration for his French forerunner, and when I made the constatation that over the past ten years my appreciation for things archaic has grown immensely.

O my friends, if you, too, should wish to read Rabelais, do not settle for a version in modernized French, let alone in translation.If French is not an option, then read the earliest available English translation, which, one might hope, will approximate, or counterfeit, as they used to say, the original strangeness. Any attempt to make Rabelais less strange, and here I mean 'strange' as in étrange, which is to say both queer and foreign, is an attempt to remove everything that makes him worth reading, every drop of sustantificque mouelle or 'substantifickal marrow' from Rabelais's strange bones. In just the first few pages, which I do not entirely understand, but which give me infinitely more pleasure than an updated version that I would understand, I have been delighted to see a poor fellow's physiognomy described as caseiforme, which brings us from headcheese to cheeseheads. I have been overjoyed to see Rabelais describing the conjugation of newlyweds as la beste à deux doz, the legendary two-backed beast, which is in fact composed of two people joyeusement se frotans leur lard [joyfully rubbing their lard]. And what of Gargamelle's feast on the tripe of a hundred bulls, where our narrator imagines the belle matiere fecale que doivoit boursouffler en elle! Intestines within intestines! The within within the within!

I don't know quite how to translate boursouffler, but it does not seem entirely remote from my present condition. Maybe if I knew how to pray it would not come to this, or had a God greater than Gargantua (who is not a god at all, but only a giant), or took as sacred those texts that deal with the soul rather than the most base organs of the body. But the train is pulling into the Gare de Lyon at this very moment, and --though I think I technically live in Canada, somehow-- Paris, for now, is as much home as anywhere.

March 1, 2010

In
sixth grade I was made along with my classmates to undertake a project
that, we were told, would teach us something about science. Our task
was to obtain a large metal coffee can (Folgers or Yuban, most likely),
and to obtain an egg (chicken, white), and to find something (anything)
of our choice to serve as padding for the egg in the can. Next, at a
specified date and time, Mr. King, the principal of Pasadena Elementary School
(which was in Sacramento, not Pasadena), took all the cans
up to the top of the school gym and threw them off one by one as the
sixth-graders watched from below. Those kids whose eggs remained
integral 'won', and those whose eggs broke 'lost'. The lesson had
something to do with materials science, or gravity, or some other
feature of the physical world whose importance escaped me.

What went into my can? Some flour, some maple syrup, some yogurt, a
sock, a dog's chew-toy, some Jell-O, a clump of hair from the bathroom
sink, some peanut butter, some celery, some chewed BubbleYum, a bit of
bubble wrap, some apple wedges. I would not be surprised to be reminded
that I had peed in the can before sealing it up, though I have no recollection of having done so.

I think I wanted the inside of the can to be a sort of microcosm, to
duplicate the outer world of qualitative variety and complexity in
which eggs thrive. I seem to have believed that if one of the
ingredients could not come to the egg's rescue, another surely would,
and that that saving ingredient, whether the peanut butter or the sock,
needed only to be represented in a token amount. To say that this was a
primitive sort of thinking would not be the half of it. It bore obvious
affinities to voudun and like practices, but rather than
creating a double of some particular person or thing, I wanted nothing
less than to bring into being a fetish object of the world itself.

In a sense, this has been my approach to every project I have taken on
since, whether creative or scholarly. In the hope of protecting against
failure, I throw in everything available. If this footnote doesn't save me, that one will. In
the end I want everything, no matter how remotely connected to the
topic at hand, to get its mention. I don't think this makes my work
bad, in any case I hope it doesn't, though it does obligate me to
constantly keep a natural inclination in check.

What stuns me now when I think about this incident is how utterly
inflexible personality is, and how consistently a deep, generally
invisible pattern is able to determine the way a person performs in
seemingly unconnected spheres of life. The recipe I threw together for
that can was a rough draft of everything I have ever written. But how
can it be that a lump of yogurt placed in a can in 1984 can come from
the same place in a person's psyche as does a footnote 26 years later?
The answer to this question probably lies somewhere in Spinoza, as the
devotion to an everything-in-everything vision of the world leads
directly back to Leibniz. With Spinoza, I strive to simply ride
out this determined state of affairs, rather than to bemoan it as some
sort of malediction, and with Horace I accept that, while you can drive
out your own nature with a pitchfork, it always comes roaring back
again.

It might be worth mentioning that my egg broke. It didn't just
crack. Its yolk had so thoroughly intermingled with the disgusting mass
of slop in which I had encased it, one would have thought I had included among my fetish object's many fluids a spoonful of hollandaise.
Other boys, who had used nothing but space-age synthetic materials and
whose eggs came out whole, were praised as rocket scientists and as
future astronauts. They applauded one another heartily, shutting me and
my freaky voodoo can out of the post-launch cheer altogether. The girls
had wrapped their eggs in silks and cottonballs, and were weeping over
their near universal failure to bring them down to earth in one piece.
It was as if the poor lasses had confused this science experiment with
another one that would come a few years later, in sex ed, when the egg
transforms not into an astronaut reentering the earth's atmosphere, but
a delicate infant.

Here is what I wish I had done: rather than surrounding the egg with
the microcosmic principles of everything, I should have allowed only
the principle of the egg itself into the can. I should have filled the
can with nothing but eggs (a large Yuban can would probably hold 12-15
of them). Surely not every egg would break in any given toss. I could
select one that did not break and call it 'my' egg. This would be a
properly philosophical approach, one that the public-school teachers of
modest intellect would no doubt try to disqualify. I would have loved to
see them contorting themselves to explain why, though I had pulled a
whole egg out of my launched can, I had nonetheless not respected the
spirit of the assignment. But it took me a full quarter century to come
up with this idea, and at this point no one wants to see me throwing
anything at all off the roof, no matter how philosophical.

But maybe it's not too late to write a book that would be the
intellectual equivalent of an egg-only can? What would that look like,
I wonder? How could I even get started?

January 31, 2010

The last time I went to a poetry reading, I was made to sit patiently
as a preening, college-age jack-ass indignantly declaimed, in verse
that could only be called 'free', his strong disapproval of Dick
Cheney. A serious issue, to be sure, but certainly not serious in a way
that gets my poetic imagination going. If I confess a sympathy for what
Stefan George called 'pure aestheticism' in poetry, this is not because
I believe myself to be above politics, but because I believe that
poetry is above current events, and by 'current' I mean whatever social
world human beings have managed to throw together for themselves, for
now, until it comes apart. Leave engagement with that to prose, which
is to say to the vastly greater part of what language does in this,
what Walter Benjamin rightly called our 'prosaic age'. Prose is the
(more or less) formally unrestricted use of natural language for the
telling of captivating things about the world. The formal restrictions
of poetry, by contrast, bring it about that whatever poetry says about
the world, it is always also saying something about language. This
means, among other things, that translating poetry is at least something quite
close to writing poetry (unless we take as an example Nabokov's hyper-literalist translation of Evgenii Onegin,
which was meant precisely to illustrate that a true translation of one
language's poetry into another can only come out as prose). Someone who has translated a novel, by contrast,
certainly could not be said eo ipso to have written a novel.

What language is poetry about? Generally, it is about the
language it is in. In translation, in turn, poetry is about
the limitations of the fit of one language with another. These two
facts together mean that, in writing poetry, in contrast with prose
(more or less), it matters what language one is writing in. I have
become convinced, in fact, that good poetry, the best poetry, is the poetry that
seeks to lay bare the essence of the language that serves as its medium. Now I
understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view languages do
not have essences, but are ever-evolving accretions of borrowings,
local adaptations, creolizations and mishearings, but that does not
change the fact that, in terms of expressive power, 'life', 'earth',
and 'kin' sound closer to the soul of English than, say, 'vitality',
'terrestrial', or 'family'. I have thus also come to appreciate the
extent to which the essence of English is Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, and
to think that no one understood his task as a poet better than Seamus
Heaney, when he undertook to translate Beowulf into modern
English, in part, as he explained, to come to better know not just the
source language, but also the target language.

January 4, 2010

"We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content." --Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, "Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!")

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

"I hate guitars," he would often announce. "I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing." The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. "The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana," Boone once said to me. "They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates." Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. "Yes I suppose."

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious "yes, I suppose," instead of a thoughtless "yeah, I guess," the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

*

Boone lost his life unexpectedly, a little over a year ago, while travelling to Australia, where he had been invited to give a series of readings at cafés, YMCAs, extended learning centers, places like that. He was on the ill-fated Qantas flight 73 from Singapore to Perth on October 6, 2008, which in mid-flight suffered such a severe and sudden loss of altitude that it sent all unbuckled passengers head-first toward the ceiling. Many of Boone's flightmates suffered lacerations and broken bones. Boone himself, who had been in the lavatories at the time of the drop, was the only passenger to lose his life. As if that were not bad enough, to top it all off the autopsy report later revealed that he had been defecating at the fateful moment. Shawn Kumpe, a staff writer for the Fresno News & Review, would later quip: "You can't exactly say [Boone] died as he lived. Who spends their life taking shits at 39,000 feet?"

Boone's legacy might have been limited to cheap one-liners in the free weekly newspaper of his hometown, had a recent Ph.D. thesis in the 'Postcolonial Discourses' program at the University of Witwatersrand entitled The Boone Rhizome: Interrogating Space in the Poetry of Jason Boone, not sought to bring serious critical attention to Jason Boone's work. The author of the thesis, Augusta Aardappel (reported in the Fresno News & Review to have been Boone's on-again-off-again girlfriend during her undergrad studies at UC Fresno), explained in an interview on Pretoria public-access television that she wanted to "take postcolonial studies to a whole-nother level," by turning its critical eye upon "the postcolonial subject's ultimate other," namely, "the entitled, self-absorbed, totally clueless white Californian male who galavants around the world like he owns it, offering up pat explanations of everything he sees after, like, five minutes of observation."

Prior to Aardappel's thesis, what little critical reaction there had been to Boone's poetry was overwhelmingly negative. If he had any following at all, it was among students --most of his published work during his lifetime, other than one self-financed volume printed by some anarchist collective in Nova Scotia, appeared in the UC Fresno independent student newspaper, The Grapevine-- who saw in him a sort of Bukowski, but less overtly libidinous and less proudly low-class, a poet who, in the American tradition going back to Whitman, had no other goal than to sing the song of himself.

December 6, 2009

I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time. That's different, I insisted, because they were only addressing the issue (I supposed) within the comfortable mythological confines of their culture, rather than asking what space and time look like when you strip away your culture's contingent myths, which are, as Spinoza would say, satisfying only to the imagination, and then see what is left over. I had an even stronger complaint about what had come to be called 'African philosophy', 'Native American philosophy', and so on. These, I thought, were more the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding brought about by the politics of identity, which supposed that every identity group --and often what counts as an identity group, I noted, is only slapped together in hasty response to the classificatory schemes of the West: as if there could have been anything like a unified tradition across the African or North American continent prior to the period of colonial expansion-- must come up with its own version of whatever it is that the West is thought to do well. I felt horribly discouraged when, on more than one occasion, while working the 'philosophy table' at my university's open house, I would meet adult Cree and Mohawks thinking of returning to school who, as they explained, might want to study 'your' (i.e., my) philosophy someday, but didn't feel any particular urgency to do so, since "we've got philosophers of our own."

Are there in fact Cree philosophers, not as in academically trained philosophers who are ethnically Cree, but as in full members of Cree communities who, without 'the West' so much as hearing of it, fulfill a role in their communities that could justly be called the role of a philosopher? I now think this is a very important question, and not to be dismissed. John Dewey thought so as well, it seems, and in the foreword to a curious 1927 work by Paul Radin, entitled Primitive Man as Philosopher, the great pragmatist endorses Radin's view that "philosophic origins are not to be sought for in the cruder and conventionalized forms which religious beliefs assumed among the populace at large, but rather in the interpretations of the small intellectual class, whose ideas may have been crude because of limitations of subject matter at their command, but which at least were bold, independent, and free within these limitations." Radin goes on to describe a debate he heard among some Dakota elders over the question whether "the rock and the earth are married or not." Radin says that to us this question may appear 'trivial' (an odd choice of words; I think Radin should have said 'nonsensical'), but nonetheless it is a question "of an entirely speculative nature," and most importantly for Radin, it is a question that will not be of interest to the ordinary lot of men, who "will simply regard it as a fact." It is the speculativeness of the question, together with the exclusivity of the group asking it, that qualifies this domain of Dakota discourse as 'primitive philosophy'.

Naturally, the Cree I speak with at the open houses do not want to be credited with their own primitive or proto-philosophy; they mean to say rather that their tradition does something that is entirely equal to, and entirely separate from, what the tradition that supposedly began with Thales does. Whether this is the case or not is to me the interesting question, rather than whether, as Dewey and Radin both seem to suppose, Native Americans in the pre-contact state did something that bore the same relationship to real philosophy as the one we generally suppose branches of ethnoscience like medicine or astronomy bear to modern science.

The possible reasons to think they did not and could not have had a separate-but-equal philosophy are, I think, four. First, the tradition was entirely oral, so that there could be no body of texts on which to build from generation to generation. Second, as Dewey notes, they were limited in the range of subject matter at their command. Third, as I've already mentioned, and as Radin's chosen example shows, the sort of philosophical questioning that motivated the discussions seems to have been devoted to the fine-tuning, rather than to the clearing away, of myths: there was no radical pursuit of the reality masked by conventions, as there clearly was among the Greeks. Finally, there does not seem to have been the sort of sociocultural complexity to give rise to multiple ways of being within the same community (classes, specialized labor, and so on), and as Aristotle himself noted, it is this sort of social complexity that makes possible a niche for philosophers, who in turn reflect back upon the diversity of their society and take an interest in discovering the unity behind it.

November 9, 2009

In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy:

When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being 'advanced'... After years of training, I now find myself intimately convinced of a few unsophisticated beliefs, not very different from those I held at the age of fifteen. Perhaps I see more clarly the inadequacy of these intellectual tools; at least they have an instrumental value which makes them suitable for the service I require of them.

Later, in a 1972 interview, he confesses that his decision to study philosophy was motivated by a sense that this discipline, more than any other, would enable him to remain non-committal, to continue to develop all his other interests, under the big-tent of a vaguely defined cluster of intellectual projects called 'philosophy'. This understanding of philosophy, I think, remains significant for our assessment of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual legacy.

For better or worse, while his approach may have made sense in the Paris of the 1920s, as I can personally attest it certainly would not in the New York or California of the 1990s (when I was a student of philosophy). Here, a different conception of philosophy and its boundaries reigned, and still reigns. As Jason Stanley recently reflected at the Leiter Report blog:

Many academics use the term 'philosopher' not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline - be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term 'philosopher' as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers.

Stanley argues in another post that his own philosophical tradition may be distinguished from a rival tradition, represented by Walter Benjamin, that might better be called 'anthropology' than 'philosophy':

Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Stanley makes two claims in these passages that interest me: first, that not just any abstract or broad-focused thinker may appropriately be called a 'philosopher', and, second, that much of the thinking that is called by some people 'philosophy', might better be called 'anthropology' to the extent that it is principally interested in questions of culture rather than, I take it, in transcultural features of the human mind and its connections to the world.

While I certainly know Stanley is a first-rate philosopher, I do not at all share his conception of what philosophy itself is. If anything, my own understanding of the meaning of 'philosophy' is the one at work not in the United States today, nor in France in the 1920s, but rather in the title of the distinguished journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, which, since 1666, has been featuring articles on everything from the reproductive organs of eels, to the smelting of metals, to the causes of comets, to the nature of the passions, to the existence of God. It seems to me that if Stanley wants to make the case for a narrower conception of philosophy, he needs not only to argue against the misguided deployment of the word that we've certainly all heard at dinner parties, but also to explain why the very most recent self-description of a certain academic discipline in a certain part of the world should be permitted to cancel out so much accrued meaning in a word that has migrated and mutated across so many centuries, languages, and continents.

October 12, 2009

What is it about the dogs? In recent philosophy everyone from John Searle to Donna Haraway has had something to say about them. And recent philosophy, as I never tire of insisting, is nothing new.

Now I have also been insisting for some time that there is no such animal as 'animals'. That is, when it is discovered, for example, that a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden is stockpiling stones to be thrown at a later hour, this does not prove, as the popular media would claim, that 'animals' are capable of conceptualizing and planning for the future. What a chimpanzee does says nothing at all about 'animals', but at most something about chimpanzees, and likely only about some chimpanzees, or indeed only one of them. Animals, I mean to say, need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Haraway, to her credit, recognizes this. Her take on the special case of dogs issues in the somewhat cryptic claim that "we have never been human" (a riff, I think, on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern). I understand this to mean that, for as long as there have been humans, the denotation of 'we' has never been understood to include all and only members of our species. It also includes dogs: we and they have co-evolved, and in a certain sense this puts our species closer to Canis lupus familiaris than to Pan troglodytes, not with respect to the tracing back of common ancestors, but with respect to recent history, the history of the past 15,000 years or so, the history that lingers in both of our memories, in which humans have been exercising intense selective pressure on dogs, and perhaps also dogs on humans. The result is that we have come out more like each other, behaviorally and expressively, than we are to either of our nearest cousins: the grey wolf in the case of dogs, and chimpanzees in the case of humans. The wolf is the dog's closest ancestor, but this implies no solidarity. Quite the contrary: the dogs are on our side.

1. A Mirror of the Complexity of Objects

Could recent co-evolution really play a greater role in the appearance of similarity than ancestry does? That it in fact does seems to be one of the lessons of Ádám Miklósi's excellent Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition, a work that covers everything you could ever want to know about why humans and dogs fit so well together. One crucial question Miklósi addresses at length concerns the way in which this new form of symbiosis began sometime in the Upper Paleolithic. There are two competing theories. The first, going back to Darwin, holds that human beings actively sought out wolf cubs, breeding and raising them with an eye to enhancing docility. An alternative view, recently defended by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, has it that certain wolves began, of their own initiative, to take advantage of food surpluses at Paleolithic camp sites. The less fearful these wolves were of humans, and the more endearing their faces, the better were their chances of obtaining scraps of meat.Whichever side made the first move (and consensus is converging around the Coppingers' view), it is clear that this new relationship began around the same time as, or immediately preceded, a number of other, very important developments in human history, including the development of food-storage technology, the Eurasian megafauna extinction, and the expansion into the Americas: all events, it is fair to say, that played a central role in the destiny of the human species.

September 14, 2009

The Franco-Romanian aphorist and pessimist Émile Cioran describes his childhood in the Transylvanian village of Răşinari as follows:My
childhood was a paradise. Really! The Boacii hill is for me something
entirely essential. Everything else seems to be of an incomparable
mediocrity... You cannot imagine the extent to which those images are
present to my mind. Without diminishing them in the least, an idiotic
period that I regret having lived through has imposed itself between
them and me.

I
personally could not care less about the vividness of Cioran's memories
of childhood. What matters to me are my own memories, not of Răşinari
circa 1920 but of Rio Linda circa 1980, of the insects and the birds I
encountered, of the fox that I imagined to live in what we called the
‘back pasture’ even though I'd never seen him; of the leaves I tore off
from our garden's specimens, rolled between my fingers, and sampled on
my tongue; of the mole I once found floating dead in the swimming pool;
and of the cans of Del Monte vegetables I once discovered in the
cupboard, bloated from botulism like a mole in a pool.

Who
cares, you say, and that is in part my point. We each care about our
own childhood thing, and can't believe that others, who've failed to
share in it, nonetheless go about their adult lives as though nothing
were missing. But while the particular details of Boacii Hill or of Rio
Linda cannot be expected to matter, the fact that each of us has our
own version of these places is worthy of some reflection.

August 16, 2009

Do you realise what this means? Do you? Don't just stand there and stare at me with your servile grin. Tell me what it means! That's right, Isaac, that's right. This is the dawn of a new Age for our Quaeries. We shall no longer have to entrust them to scorbitical Sea-farers and Rye-soak'd country Doctors.

No, now we need simply enter our Quaeries into the trusty "Searche-Engine," and we shall have the answer to every matter ever dreamt of by Natural Philosophy, faster than you can suffocate a Sparrow in a Vacuum Chamber!

Let us give it a try. Think of a Quaery, Isaac. Anything. O never-mind, you Sugar-Loaf. I've got one:

"Whether the Engine doth know anything of 'Sexting'? Some members of our Society are keen to learn this art, but we lack so much as a single working Sextant. We used to have a fine one, until Geech the Astronomer, by some tragic mis-understanding, got it into his senescent Head that it was an Instrument for taking measure of..."

What's this Isaac? The blasted Engine has cut me off in mid-Quaery. What, then? You say I must needs be more concise? Alright then, I've another Quaery, altogether different:

"Whether Chicken-Soup be good for the Soul, and, if so, whether for the Souls of Moms, Dog-Lovers, Christian Teens, or indeed for Souls simpliciter."

Why, behold Isaac! Now we've done it! Look at this trove of Learning! There is not only Chicken-Soup for the Souls of Moms and Teens, nay, but for pre-Teens, Divorcees, Empty-Nesters, Couples, Latinos, Scrap-Bookers, and Golfers! What's that, then? No, I do not know what an Empty-Nester is, Isaac. But for every new matter unknown, I shall simply issue another Quaery! Not now, though. There are more pressing issues than your common Bird-watching. Consider for example:

"How cometh it that a Soul should be nourish'd by a Broth, and whether it be not the Soul that is nourish'd, but rather the finer Spirits of a Man's body, having some hidden Sympathy with the rarefied essence of Chicken."

Well, hmm, Isaac. This Quaery yields nothing more than if I had sent it straight to the Learnèd Society of Heligoland. Perhaps the Engine is exhausted from over-work. I shall issue it the very simplest of Quaeries:

Hmm, again nothing but Rubbish, Isaac. What's that? You say I am not entering my Quaery as I should? You say the Latin I use to conceal my intentions from the common rabble of men in fact conceals them from the Search-Engine as well? You say I must needs enter it in the Vulgate of English, and that within this Vulgate there is a sort of Artificial Characteristic or Code for the entering of it? Very well then, you go ahead:

"Where to get laid in Paris."

Eureka, I say. Eureka! I've no Idea what you've just written, but my, what a Wealth of Answers. He-he, pack my satchel for Paris, Isaac! I've some, eh, Weights and Measures to adjudge there.

July 20, 2009

I am not all that fond of natural-law theory, as I tend to think that
there are very few things about which nature sends us the
loud-and-clear message: don't do it! In fact, I've narrowed the list
down to just three: incest, coprophagy, and flying.

Now many readers will be surprised to see that last item tacked
onto the list. After all, nearly everyone who can afford to do so
flies on a regular basis, whereas sibling-marriage and shit-eating are
nearly unheard of. But I fly roughly once a month, including an
average of 2-3 round-trip transatlantic flights per year for the past
15 years, and every time I do it I think to myself: if there were a
God, and he were to finally come and give us his list of rules, he
would not tell us not to show cleavage, or drink alcohol, or any of the
usual proscriptions. He would tell us, earth creatures, to get the
hell out of the sky.

I
am one of those irrational people, ridiculed by the sane, normal, and
mature, who suffers from debilitating
aviaphobia. By 'debilitating' I mean that I spend every minute of
every flight convinced of imminent death. The suffering is so severe
that even though there is no significant statistical danger of dying in
an air disaster, I do fear that there is a real danger of physiological
consequences stemming from the anxiety. People who don't
understand will often tell me to learn a bit about the statistics of
air accidents. Trust me, I know the statistics. Tell me the name of
an airline, and I can list for you all of the fatal accidents in which
it has been involved, when and where they happened, what was the
mechanical cause.

There was a time when I could tell myself:
that air disaster over
there, in Indonesia, in the Congo, in Siberia, has nothing to do with me.
My sphere of concern has traditionally been North America between the
Arctic and the
tropical zones, the North Atlantic, and Western Europe. To some
extent, I confess I still have a way of distancing myself from certain
disasters: that was a Tupolev, I say. Anyone who gets on a Soviet-built
airplane is just asking for it. But then I remember that my basic
conviction about my own air travel is that I am asking for it too.

March 29, 2009

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects.

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art. One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty. Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’-- a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

February 2, 2009

It is well known among historians of the Soviet Union that, early in his reign, Joseph Stalin rejected Marx and Lenin's strongly internationalist variety of socialism, in favor of the more limited project of building real socialism within one state, while at the same time promoting the distinct national identities of all the ethnic groups within that state. Stalin wrote as early as 1913: "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture." He bemoaned the fact that "among the Jews there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together."

When he came to power, Stalin sought to do something for the Jews that would, for the first time in modern history, rivet the nation together. Some Jews weren't sure they liked the sound of that, but sensed that it was probably better than anything they could expect if they were to remain the neighbors of Cossacks and Belorussians. So they packed their bags and headed for the Far East to start a new life in the newly established capital of Jewish culture, the city of Birobidzhan.

There was just one small obstacle: a local population, correctly referred to as the 'Amuryak', but called by the Russians 'Birobidzhanis' ever since the rails for the Chita-Vladivostok train were first laid across the region. From the very first encounters in the 17th-century, no one knew what to make of them: they were not quite Asian, but not really anything else either. They were hairy like Ainu Men, but extremely small. A surveying team sent by Peter the Great in 1713 included a certain Nehemiah Butts, member of the Royal Society of London, who wrote to Johann Gabriel Sparwenfeld, the Swedish lexicographer and early pioneer of Slavic studies: "This Region is quite overrun by Conies, Tit-mice, and all the rudest Sortes of bird. As to the people, they are but half the Size of one Englishman, and twice, nay thrice as hirsute. The little men flee when they see such a Giant as I approaching towards them, whence I have not yet been able to ascertain, whether they are wanting of Language, or whether yet they have it, but daren't use it."

September 16, 2008

Hi-ho, brave trail-cutters! Won't you please tell us whether it is true what the French explorers say, that America is "une nation avec quantitez de beuffles," so many buffaloos in fact that one can scarce walk from door to street without risking a sharp poke in the rump? Is it true they have descended upon the great cities, and greedily muzzled the garbage there, as in New-Jersey's Camden, and the Dutch strong-hold of Coxsackie?

Can you please tell us also, whence comes this place-name, Coxsackie? Does it have to do with cocks? With sacs? Why does it reduce even learned men to puerile snickering? (Why, even as I dictate this, my loyal old secretary, Isaac, appears on the verge of an infarctus!)

But let us come to the pressing matter of that land's electoral politics. We have heard that all men in America have "the vote," and that this was the result of a tragic twist of fate some years ago in which "the vote" was rudely and unexpectedly "rock'd." Won't you please tell us wherein this rocking consisted, how many were injured, what was the role of the Red Indians, what the Negroe's, &c.?

January 8, 2008

To those travellers departing to Nova Zembla: Please confirm for us
whether the snow there gives off its own light, or only reflects that
of the moon with unusual intensity.

Hi-ho, to all those expert in the arcana of Finno-Ugric inflection:
Won’t you kindly let us know how the vocative case is faring in
Samoyed?

To the hardy citizens of Brasov (Kronstadt): We have heard reports
of a bear that descended from the mountains right into the medieval
city center, and savagely mauled an American woman hoping to take its
picture. Can you please tell us whether, firstly, the victim was
targeted in view of her nationality, and, secondly, whether the
Carpathian bear population has exploded in consequence of Nicolae
Ceausescu’s bear-fertility policies, or some other reason?

September 22, 2007

Hail myself! Hail the iron law of my development! In just five years
I have increased fat production by ten percent, and average snore
decibels by twice that. In keeping with actually existing conditions, I
have also reduced shampoo use to austerity-era levels, and increased
fourfold the daily repetition of tales of the courage I showed in
youth.

And hail my future! In five years’ time, I will surpass my father,
that running-dog of the Oak Park branch of State Farm Insurance, in
nap-minutes per afternoon, in handfuls of Costco pretzels, consumed
without deliberation, as the will of the hand and the mouth dictates.

And the ear-hair harvest will enjoy record yields, as Ninelle
procures the latest machine for its removal --the removal of actually
existing hair-- which works as well in nostril as in ear, the greatest achievement yet of the November 11 Technical Innovation Shock Brigade:
The Nozdromat-5!

Lo, but the future burns bright, like the titanium-laptop glow that
has spread from capital to province in just ten years, and in another
ten will glow in every room of every apartment bloc, in every corner of
our steely bathroom. Ninelle will have only to brush the warm screen
with her breath, and it will perform her very toilet for her.